


Addictions

by Dien



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: 3 AM Confessions, Angst, Episode Tag, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Non-Consensual Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-08
Updated: 2013-11-08
Packaged: 2017-12-31 20:32:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1036076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dien/pseuds/Dien
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Episode Tag to 'Identity Crisis'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Addictions

The library was silent as graveyards were supposed to be. More so, because in Reese's experience cemeteries were open to the air and usually contained everything from birdsongs to the sounds of passing traffic, while the library's walls had been built to keep out the auditory bustle of New York City.  
  
Finch's computers were on standby, so not even the sounds of their fans disturbed his own half-hearted attempts to read. Earlier, Finch had been snoring, but that sound had stopped too in the last hour.  
  
John leaned back into the chair and fought back a yawn as he glanced at his watch. Almost four in the morning. The E should have mostly left Finch's system by now. He'd check on the other man, then maybe catch a catnap himself.  
  
Reese set his book down and padded like a cat for the ajar doorway that led to a room that must have been an office at one point. Finch had redecorated-- there was a couch that might have been original furniture, but Reese was pretty sure the minifridge and changes of clothing weren't. Clearly Finch used this room as a secondary home or, for all Reese knew, a primary one.  
  
He'd resisted the urge to snoop around at the time, much as he'd resisted Finch's stoned invitation to _talk_. It'd have been different in daylight, in other circumstances, if Finch were sober. But not now.  
  
Reese eased the door open soundlessly, the low light spilling in behind him over the still form of the man on the couch. Finch was on his side, back facing Reese, blanket over his motionless body.  
  
“You asleep, Finch?” Reese said in a soft whisper, already preparing to close the door again.  
  
But Finch drew in a breath that audibly shuddered. “No.”  
  
“Ah.” Reese paused with his hand on the doorknob, and braced himself to ask a stupid question. “...how are you feeling?”  
  
“Like shit,” came the blunt and uncharacteristic answer, and Reese coughed a little despite himself.  
  
“Sorry to hear that. It's just the aftereffects of coming down from--”  
  
“--the MDMA, I know. I've been telling myself that since I woke up. So far it's not helping much.” Finch's voice was back to its customary level and metronomic tones, no giddily spiraling vowels or occasional giggles. Reese felt both reassured and oddly disappointed by that fact.  
  
Finch's voice also sounded a little strained, though, and Reese grunted to himself. He'd looked up the aftereffects of ecstasy after getting Finch situated, and had at least a clinical idea of what Finch was probably experiencing: fatigue coupled with insomnia, irritation, anxiety, vertigo. Aches and pains, which on top of Finch's existing injuries might explain why he was lying so carefully still.  
  
“Anything I can do? You need any more water?”  
  
Finch was silent for several seconds. Back very much to normal, then, Reese thought with another weird pang of quasi-disappointment. Not that he _wanted_ Finch to be high. It had been downright disturbing at times. And it was stupid to miss the open trust Finch had been exhibiting when that trust had been born of nothing more than altered brain chemistry, and possibly also Finch not even recognizing who he was talking to at the moment.  
  
He'd caught the _Good night, Nathan_. Joys of having keen hearing.  
  
The sound of another shuddering exhale broke the silence. “...if you don't mind... in the freezer compartment in the fridge there are some icepacks. I'd get them myself but everything spins when I try to sit up.”  
  
“I don't mind,” Reese murmured, and stepped into the room.  
  
He found the gelpacks half by touch in the dimness of the office. There were carefully folded hand towels atop the fridge, and he guessed at their purpose and wrapped each pack in one before moving to Finch.  
  
“Neck and leg?” he guessed, and would have tried to position them himself, but Finch lifted a hand, pale in the darkness, and took each one in turn.  
  
Finch's glasses were setting neatly on a sidetable, where Reese had placed them earlier. Without them Finch looked-- well, not younger, especially not with his face in tight lines of pain at the moment. But naked, in a way. Reese hovered as Finch eased the icepacks into place, on, yes, his neck and leg.  
  
“Painkillers?” he half-asked, half-offered, but Finch just jerked his head a little in a wordless _no_. Reese let it be.  
  
John stood there for several seconds. He hated feeling useless. Intellectually he knew this too would pass for Finch and there wasn't a lot he could do, probably wasn't a lot Finch was comfortable with him _doing_ , but all the same. He was just getting ready to move back into the other room when Finch spoke again.  
  
“I was such an idiot. I can't get over that.”  
  
Ah, self-castigation. John knew about _that_. There was an office chair in the corner; John felt for it and sat down.  
  
“We were both pretty damned sure that Jordan-- my Jordan-- was the leader. It was a reasonable mistake, Harol... Finch.” Sobriety seemed to dictate he ought to return to surnames as well.  
  
Finch huffed, a little shakily. “The initial mistake? Yes. But she-- she played me. I allowed it. Fell for it. _Enjoyed_ it, even. _Stupid._ ”  
  
The raw note of self-loathing in Finch's voice made Reese close his eyes. A little too similar to his own mental dialogue, at times. Finch had been right, all those months ago: they were more alike than they appeared.  
  
“It's an addiction in its own right, isn't it?” Finch asked him out of the blue, and Reese blinked, torn from his own train of thought.  
  
“Sorry?”  
  
“Playing the hero. The cowboy to ride in and save the day, right the wrongs... at first I couldn't understand your recklessness. You'd be out there taking chances I thought were _suicidal_ and I kept asking myself, were you the right choice after all, or were you still working off a death wish.... I didn't get it. I think I do now.”  
  
Alright, maybe the E wasn't _completely_ out of Finch's system. Reese doubted a Finch in 100% control of his faculties would ever speak so openly to him. Finch's voice was level but sounded tired, so tired.  
  
He shifted a little in his chair, slightly uncomfortable. Again Finch's words were cutting a little close to home.  
  
“Not sure what you're talking about, Finch. You should try and get back to sleep, you sound like you need it.”  
  
“I can't,” Finch said flatly. “I've been trying. I just keep replaying it. _'Surely it'd be safe with YOU there!'_ I suppose you've learned to tune that sort of thing out...  
  
“I've been in personal, physical danger more times since I hired you than in.... probably my entire life before then,” Finch continued, speaking to the couch cushions, his back still to Reese. “The day I got my injuries being the exception to prove the rule. But I've... put myself in the middle of a robbery, gone onto rooftops, planted guns in a taxicab, broken and entered _multiple_ times now, poked someone in the eyes, been hit in the head, been knocked on my ass by an explosion...  
  
“And I've never felt so alive,” he whispered. “My back and leg are screaming at me each night after I do something like this and I don't care, I do it anyway, you have no idea the lectures my physical therapist has been giving me.  
  
“That's extremely unhealthy. Don't you think? I think it is. Getting addicted to the rush... I hired you precisely so I'd never _have_ to put myself in situations like this and... here we are.”  
  
Reese would have studied his fingernails if there'd been enough light to make it convincing. Not that Finch was looking at him.  
  
“It's... it's a coping mechanism,” he said with a clearing of his throat, and was surprised at how rough his own voice sounded. “It's that or start shutting down in dangerous situations. Don't blame your body for doing what it has to to survive.”  
  
“Adrenaline's one thing. Getting addicted to being the hero's another,” Finch answered with a little wheeze that Reese thought might have been a bitter laugh. “Some of us are better suited to that than others. Specifically, those of us without bum legs and debilitating neck injuries.”  
  
“...there is that,” Reese admitted with the ghost of a smile. “Look. We... should probably... reconsider our tactics. Too many close calls lately.”  
  
“Microchips,” Finch muttered.  
  
“What?”  
  
“Microchips. I'm not going to rely only on our phones in the field again. That's one wrecked for me-- two counting the one I destroyed with Root-- and.... my God, I've lost track of _yours_. Seven? Eight? Either way I'm tired of operating blind when it happens. An arphid under the skin is very doable.”  
  
Reese snorted. “I like that you're making that decision for me. We can schedule in a hell of an argument about it, for tomorrow when you're feeling better.”  
  
“I'm the _boss_ , Mr. Reese. You're the hero-for-hire.”  
  
“I might demand a raise.”  
  
“As I've told you before... all you have to do is ask,” Finch answered, his voice slightly muffled.  
  
“Yeah.” Reese lapsed into silence, leaning back in the chair and staring at the office's far wall. Shadows on shadows, the soft light from the other room lending shape to things but no color.  
  
He remembered Stanton. _We are the dark_. He remembered training exercises, blindfolds, bones breaking beneath his foot, how fragile Finch's neck had been when he'd closed his hand around it, the impossible warmth like a sunrise when he'd watched Judge Gates playing with his son. A hundred things, life before and life now.  
  
Finch's doing. Finch had turned his world upside down, taken him from a long slide into whiskey-soaked oblivion and given him a new drug. Saving people.  
  
It came with brutal crashes, some days. But the highs were like none other.  
  
It had never occurred to him that Finch might be having his world as thoroughly altered as he himself was.  
  
He studied the other man again, but Finch still had his back to him, was a blanket-shrouded mystery still in so many ways despite four a.m. confessions and the names of dead men on his lips. Reese ran a hand through his hair, felt the stubble on his jaw and the exhaustion from the day's chaos.  
  
“Try and sleep again, Finch,” he advised. “More you can, the better you'll feel.”  
  
“Such optimism,” Finch responded dryly, but tugged the blanket up a little all the same. “There's a couch in the lobby. You should get some sleep too.”  
  
“I'll go in a bit,” Reese said. “When you're comfortable again.”  
  
“You might be waiting a long time,” said Finch. But he didn't argue.  
  
Reese sat, and waited, and waited some more. Finch's breathing evened out gradually, slowing to a steady in and out, in and out. Only when he was sure Finch was asleep again did Reese get to his feet, and walk for the light.


End file.
